Cathy: This is Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com, who he does rock, and we’re going to be talking about how to find JV partners.

Reid: JV like Junior Varsity? What does JV mean? Now I’m back in high school That’s weird.

Cathy: Joint Venture.

Reid: Joint Venture?

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: What does that even mean? That’s lingo.

Cathy: It is lingo.

Reid: I’m a sex educator, I don’t anything about business.

Cathy: (Laughs) a joint-venture partner is someone you create stuff with. So Reid and I, in a sense, have done joint-venture partnerships. He’s done programs with me and my other business partner Rick.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: That we promoted to both of our lists and sold, and they’re for sale on both websites.

Cathy: Yeah. That’s different from a business partner, where you might be merging the businesses, or working within one business together. A joint-venture partner is someone who has their business. They’re promoting something either you’ve both done, or that you’ve done to their lists, but it’s very distinct. You’re not merging your businesses or becoming one business.

Cathy: What the distinction is, is an affiliate is someone who promotes a little bit.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: A JV who’s all in, ‘I’m here, this is going to be fantastic. I might be speaking at the event, or I might be giving bonuses for people that purchase through my link.’

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: So joint-venture partner for promotion, for an affiliate, is someone who is in the top five usually; the people that are really bringing in the numbers, and really promoting it hard.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Again, depending on who you’re talking to, in different parts of the infomarketing world, especially, they’ll… JV partners might be the umbrella term for all of their affiliates. It might be for their top five. It might be for the people that… I’m trying to sell Sex Geek Summer Camp, or invite people to come to it, so Cathy and I are going to do a phone call or a Google hangout where she’s going to interview me about camp, and maybe like the top three challenges sex educators have around business. We’re just pulling this out of our butts.

Cathy: (Laughs) Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Reid: So her interviewing me and promoting it to her list is creating content for her. So in some ways, you could almost think of podcasts as kind of mini joint ventures all the time, because you’re always interviewing new people to create content for your followers, but the next bump up is Cathy interviews me, promotes to her list ‘camp’, but has an affiliate link where she gets a cut of the sales. That’s where podcasts don’t always leverage that.

If you’re here, and you’re watching this as a sex educator, and you have podcasts, you can think of it this way: If you’re going to interview me, and we’re going to talk about whatever you think your followers want to talk about, do I have a product I can promote that you also get an affiliate kickback on, should your followers buy that? That’s more of an affiliate JV kind of relationship where you’re By this interaction, we’re creating content that benefits both parties.

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: Usually there’s some sort of financial gain that gets shared if people buy. Hopefully you’re not doing it in some pressurey, “you must buy now”, but it’s more like, “hey, I hope this information on business helped.”

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: If you’re a sex educator and you want to get better business, come to camp. Here’s the link.

Cathy: Right. It’s a way to serve people too. So we just did… Reid and I just did a money and relationship intensive, and the people that we talked to during the intensive, the interviews we did, those people would not be considered JV per se, but we did give them a link to find out more about the people with an affiliate link when they had it.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: Reid and I created…

Reid: So that’s more cross promotion.

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: We’re just cross promoting people, and that would be mostly traditional podcasting. It’s just … You’re just interviewing people and promoting whatever they’re up to just by the fact that you needed to interview somebody for podcast episode 13.

Cathy: Yeah. Reid and I did a JV on that, in that we created a product together that is now… It’s a bonus for relationship 10x. It’ll be for sale later on through the websites.

Reid: So that actual product gets created, and it’s a joint venture in our creating it.

Cathy: Right.

Reid: And understand that in the industry, JV is also, sometimes means people who will promote all of… Certain things that you’re doing with an affiliate link where they get a kickback, because that’s their business. Their business is promoting awesome things to their followers, and that could also be considered a JV.

Cathy: Yeah, and how you find them is, at least how I do it, is I look for people that have similar interests and similar integrity. I’m very particular the people that we had on the money and relationship intensive were all really savvy, caring people.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You did a great job finding good people for that.

Cathy: Thank you. I spend a lot of time. I went through their websites, I read some of their material, watched some of their videos, and some of them, I had already known personally and knew they were just kick ass, but I wanted to make sure that I was not representing my business saying that The Intimacy Dojo, Thriving Now, Reid About Sex, we’re saying that this person is good and they worked.

Reid: Yeah, you should vet the people that you’re working with so that you don’t end up not getting a bad reputation or pissing off your followers, or having somebody who’s already pissed off their people promoting you, so that now they’re pissed off at you.

Cathy: Yeah, and if you find someone you think is a good, good fit, because Reid and I actually started out working in business this way. I really loved a lot of the things he said. I’d seen some of his articles, I’d actually had his sessions to get me out dating.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: At the end of that session, I was like, ‘this guy is amazing, I want to …’ I had a list of fifty-thousand people. I want these people to hear what he has to say. So we … But we didn’t start off with, ‘let’s make a big product and sell it’, it was like, ‘would you come do a free interview with our list? At the end you can tell them about your website, but let’s answer this particular question about awkwardness.’ So we did a free call, people loved it. So we did a second call, and I think that one was paid like seven dollars just come…

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cathy: People loved it. So we ended up making a product. We put those two calls together with three other calls and offered a product for sale.

Reid: So sometimes you can put feelers out to kind of test drive the people that you want to work with, and then develop that or groom it into a JV partnership.

Cathy: Yeah, so I recommend … I see people all the time, and they’re like, “this person’s awesome, I just met them, but we’re going to do this …” They make this extensive business plan and they’re very invested with each other, and then it falls apart; they don’t know the person. It’s kind of like getting married on the first date.

Reid: Go slow!

Cathy: Yeah.

Reid: Take your time.

Cathy: So, test it out. See how well they come through with stuff. If they’re sick, do they fall apart and fade away for two months? Are they going to show up and … ‘Okay, we have a live call in an hour, what are you going to do?’ How well do they take care of themselves? Do they meet their obligations? If you start finding a good blend, then you can step deeper of that.

Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative). The big message here is you don’t have to build everything yourself.